Include hidden products in Google Feed

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Is there any way of exporting hidden products into the google feed.
I believe Actinic doesn't (not in V9, not sure of V10 or V11) as standard but didn't know of any tips/tricks on how this might be achieved.

The only options I have thought of:
1. unhide the products manually, export the feed and then rehide - Not efficient + asking for trouble.
2. Purchase Jan Mole End Google Mash - Not Free
3. Perform a databse query on the Actinic database and automate the creation of the feed.

Any other suggestions welcome.

[Mike Hughes]

I think that pretty much covers your options.

I'm intrigued why you'd want to do this. If the product is hidden then visitors won't find it when they visit the page and this could cause you problems with Google.

Or is this a way of getting products that are options visible in Google Products rather than the 'synthetic' master product? That would make sense.

I assume Google doesn't run a database check for consistency with their rules? I would have thought mulitiple products pointing to the same page would be a good indication that it wasn't just one product per page. Something to be aware of anyway.

Mike

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Yes it is for products with options so I can submit each product variant to Google Products (providing it has it's own UPC/EAN).

I beleive Googles rules have changed very recently to allow more than one variant per page providing they have different UPC and only a single add to cart button, although as usual Google is unclear on the rules.

Quoting from http://www.google.com/support/mercha...?answer=160161

What if my products have more than one UPC? Please use the following guidelines when submitting UPCs:

Variant products: For products which have a different UPCs for each variant of the item, such as size or color, please submit individual product listings with one UPC per item.

After spending a couple of hours reading up on the situation my conclusion is that this is now allowed. (I assume this has been introduced since the recent changes requiring UPC, Brand, MPN, etc), and I wanted to try it out and see if the feed would be accepted.

As a trial I could just manually modify the feed.

[justinhill]

This isn't strictly relevant but I thought I'd mention that after messing around a lot with this I turned the whole feed process on its head. I now maintain my products outside Actinic, in a huge multi-sheet Excel workbook. One of the worksheets gets saved-as and becomes an import to Actinic, another gets saved-as and becomes the google feed. (A third gets saved-as to update the rma portal's product codes list and a fourth becomes a Bing feed - or would if Bing would let me open an account.)

This allows me to accommodate google's ever-growing list of required fields and avoid problems with mapping etc. You can do a surprising amount of text manipulation in Excel formulas.

Justin